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Rescuers, as of Sunday, were still conducting searches—dangerous searches—of the capsized Costa Concordia cruise liner for the missing passengers, now presumed dead. Imagine if the rescuer were able to hold up a mobile device at the scene to survey the ship from the outside. This device would reveal details of the ship’s design, location of critical systems and--most crucial of all—the location of the bodies inside.

Russell J Clark, associate director at Georgia Institute of Technology’s Research Network Operations Center is working on such a project to enhance situational awareness for first responders, he tells me and while the example he gives is a more typical scenario of fire fighters arriving at a burning building, it could apply to the sad situation of the Costa Concordia as well.

“This work combines projects in building sensors and instrumentation with novel user interfaces such as mobile augmented reality,” he says.

Key to this technology working on a widespread basis, though, is ubiquitous, high-speed network access, such as 4G cellular.

Oh well.

Clearly, the nation is not there at a point where 4G cellular could be called ubiquitous. This post is not about when, or if, that will happen be, or for that matter, how to even define 4G—a subject best left to the standards-setting body of the International Telecoms Union.

Rather, this post is taking a leap of faith that this next generation of mobile broadband it is coming and in the foreseeable future. However, besides new tools for first responders and new mobile play toys for everyone else, what will it mean?

1.6 Million New Jobs

In a word, new jobs, says Washington think tank NDN—1.6 million of them.

That is what the switch between 3G and 4G will mean for the economy. That is also roughly how many—1.58 million--were created when cellphones transited from 2G to 3G between April 2007 to June 2011, it said in a new report.